During the tumultuous ’50s, the Yokuts of central California made a courageous attempt to defend themselves against an invasion of their lands — and, for a length of time, succeeded. On a hilltop located just to the east of present-day Porterville, Calif., a siege occurred in 1856 — at what is now known as Battle Mountain — during a confrontation that the newspapers of the time referred to as the Tule River War.
The Yokuts — that is, the people loosely grouped together as speakers of the Yokuts’ language — lived in small bands amid the oak-studded foothills of the eastern San Joaquin Valley. Many of their villages lay near the shoreline of Tulare Lake (sometimes called Tule Lake), a body of water 60 miles across. Today, water diversion projects have left no trace of middle California’s watery past, but in the 1850s, Tulare Lake was the largest body of fresh water west of the Great Lakes.
When the Spanish first settled California, there were more than 20,000 Indians living in and around the Tulare Valley. Along with the Yokuts were a significant number of coastal Indians who had fled from the missions into the interior valley. Making good use of stolen horses, the Yokuts had become deft raiders of livestock from missions and sprawling rancheros near Los Angeles, Santa Barbara, San Jose, San Fernando and San Luis Obispo. They saw the newcomers who arrived during the California Gold Rush as a threat. One miner wrote a letter to the Cleveland Plain Dealer in August 1849, mentioning that there was an abundance of gold on the Kings River but that the Indians were so hostile, that those [prospectors] who attempted to work there were driven out.
John Wood and fellow miners had settled on the south bank of the Kaweah River. In December 1850, area tribesmen told Wood and company to leave. When the mining company was slow to go away, the Yokuts attacked, leaving all but two of the settlers dead. Wood was skinned alive.
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